Notes on Dying Vaccine Refusers

The annual CPAC Conference is, year-in and year-out, one of the American political scene's most reliable sources of lulz. You may remember, for instance, Trump hugging the American flag like Linus hugging his blankie. While a lot of it is just anodyne conservative bullshit -- repugnant cable news talking heads who are mildly ashamed of their Yale degrees doing their best to hoot and holler to an upper middle-class suburban audience that view themselves as the last defenders of Real America -- you will inevitably get a pretty wide swathe of truly dumb motherfuckers with glazed-over eyes who actually smoke their own supply. These -- the Diamond and Silks and the Lauren Boeberts and the Mike Cernoviches -- are of course far more entertaining. And you will also get people who say shit that's so dumb that you can't help but assume that they are charlatans, as charming in their way as the Artful Dodger, before you realize that one should never ascribe to malice what one can ascribe to stupidity.

Which is why it should come as no surprise that at this year's conference -- themed "America Uncanceled," because conservatives now interpret even the mildest forms of criticism as "cancellations" and proceed to whine like bitches -- featured Alex Berenson (also a shamefaced Yalie, so he's a toofer), the onetime spy novelist, self-proclaimed "COVID contrarian," and author of a book called Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence (won't somebody pleeeeeease think of the children?!) getting an audience of cheers for America's failure to vaccinate.

Of course Anthony Fauci called this "horrifying," which was, of course, Berenson's intention. Make a trollish statement, get the cretins to bay along, and BAM! The lib doth protest too much, methinks.

This has, of course, been the animating force of the right for over a decade. Failing to gin up public support for supply-side economics in the post-2008 Crash era, or foreign military adventures in the post-Iraq era, and given the fragility of the white-evangelical base in an increasingly non-religious, increasingly socially liberal era, they are increasingly settling on one of the most reliable emotional angles: pure resentment.

This is largely the Democrats' fault as well. By supporting reprehensibly hawkish foreign policy and Wall Street cronyism, the Democratic Party failed to establish a platform other than nice-guy centrism, and by refusing to support even broadly popular policies like Medicare for All (70 percent support) and the Green New Deal (60 percent approval) which alienate their donor class, the Dems have adopted a smug, adults-in-the-room stance that benefits nobody.

Meaning that the Republican party's ideology -- living in a world where their old cornerstone values of respect for tradition have become utterly passe -- has simply become being an absolute cunt to everyone around you.

This is why I can't stand the liberals who think that if you just give people the Correct Facts, they'll stop thinking the Bad Things and will start thinking the Good Things. And article-of-faith statements like "believe science" just come off as finger-wagging. Sure, there are non-committed people who are persuadable, and in my experience a lot of younger people are persuadable as soon as they finally get offline, but roughly 25 percent of America who are irreversibly brain-poisoned.

Which is why in places like Florida and the Ozarks, cases are surging among people who refuse to get vaccinated.

I always sympathize with the skeptical perspective -- I was actually pretty skeptical of the efficacy of non-N95 masks until enough evidence mounted to convince me that this skepticism was misplaced. And among minority populations that have often found themselves to be unwilling guinea pigs, the skepticism is a lot more understandable -- wrong, but at least understandable. But the racial gap in COVID vaccination is narrowing fast, leaving a group of predominantly white, predominantly male, predominantly Republican stalwarts. Sure, these people are more concentrated among the lowest income bracket, but interestingly, the number of white vaccine refusers is higher at the $50,000 to $75,000 income bracket than the $25,000 to $50,000 bracket.

And something tells me this is not really even "skepticism."

Skepticism as I understand it is a questioning of grounds and motivation, a search for empirical evidence, a commitment to analytical thinking, and perhaps above all else a rigorous self-examination and an attempt to root out one's own biases and misperceptions and misinterpretations. And something tells me that most of these people have not reached their conclusions after a careful analysis of the scientific literature.

All of which seems pretty doubly absurd when you live, as I do, in a country whose government has spectacularly biffed the vaccine rollout, where people are clambering desperately for protection.

Republican politicians in places like Arkansas and Missouri are understandably freaking the fuck out, realizing that they can no longer control the narrative of the very base they had spent decades agitating, as their hospitals fill and their citizenry dies off. Meanwhile, in Florida, Ron DeSantis, the fancy lad that even my nerdy ass wants to shove in a locker, attempts to ride the tiger by speaking out against "vaccine passports" to protect his presidential aspirations, while quietly maintaining an exemption for cruise ships for fear of the Carnival Sensation becoming a masque of the red death.

To which I have to say, at this point -- after nearly half a century of very deliberate machinations by the ruling class that needed some kind of ideological scaffolding for the protection of their wealth -- chickens came home to roost motherfucker.

At this point, the path to herd immunity and the possibility of a post-pandemic life is being impeded by the vaccine hesitant. They, at this point, are bearing the worst of it, considering the fact that they're the ones getting sick, along with those with the extreme misfortune of being their vulnerable relatives or minor children.

When I think about those whose vaccine skepticism has led to the sudden realization that there isn't a ventilator available, I wonder what they're thinking. Maybe there's some self-reflection, maybe that fabled road-to-Damascus moment. Or maybe there is just an ideological commitment to the end, a refusal to the last to come to terms with one's own reality. Or maybe there is an ironic detachment, in its own way a final trolling.

But unlike so many liberals, I won't call this a "tragedy," as a tragedy is a circumstance in which men and women strive for good, and due to their own failings or circumstances beyond their control, are condemned to failure. This isn't a tragedy. This is America sharting its pants.

So I'll just say the following to that vaccine refuser on his deathbed.

Now you're fucking dead. Sucks for you dawg.

Ozymandias at Arecibo

It's remarkable how much of my education I can attribute to my childhood/teen habit of watching late-night television. Before the Internet, this was where the mystery lay.

I was seven or eight years old, watching the X-Files – a habit that helped instill in me a lifelong love of the weirdness and darkness lurking around the American fringe. There was a lot of snide talk about “little green men,” a lot of cagey dialogue, gray sky.

Agent Mulder ran along the edge of what was identified as the Arecibo Radio Observatory – white guy-wires criss-crossing the elegant curve of a massive, concave satellite dish, precise lines contrasted against the verdant Puerto Rican jungle.

 

Nothing seemed more indicative of the modernist idea of the future. It was the same impulse I'd registered in old atlases from the 1950s and 1960s, with their breathless prologues proclaiming exploration as the... dramatic pause... destiny of man, at a time when such grand notions could be contemplated. I'd registered this impulse in diagrams of orbital paths, the ocean depths, cloud patterns. Nothing seemed to be a purer representation of the human will to enter communion with the stars.

On December 2^nd, as I scrolled through the headlines of the day – continued political fracas and pandemic spread across America (expected, miserable), the transitioning of a pint-sized Canadian actor (and pausing to wonder, over my coffee, if any nerdy dudes were no longer able to masturbate to Kitty Pryde) – there it was.

My childhood image of scientific progress lay there shattered,the jungle lurking beneath the cracked concrete.

 

In 1960, construction began on the Arecibo Radio Telescope, designed to study the ionosphere as part of a DARPA project to allow for more effective scanning of ballistic missiles. As with so much American science of the mid-20^th Century, the spirit of discovery was facilitated by Cold War interests. And yet it became known not for any defense against the ICBMs that never came, but for its pivotal role in astronomical observation. This was where solid evidence of the neutron star was found, where the binary pulsar was first observed, and where, in 1974, Carl Sagan and others transmitted a radio frequency towards the Hercules Global Cluster in the impossible hope that some alien species would find it, decode it, and nod towards us as an intelligent species.

That kind of optimism seems, in 2020, to be so damn naive. And it's not just the fact that it's been a shit year (not helped by Facebook Boomer “2020 duhr huhr huhr” memes). It's the fact that this was a once-mighty site of scientific endeavor, slowly defunded as the American public sector was strangled to death by increasingly fiscally hawkish governments over the '90s and '00s, until it was a mere shell of its former self. In 2016, Arecibo lost its position as the world's largest single-aperture telescope to the new Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou Province, China, and in 2017, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, leaving millions of Puerto Ricans without power and water for months, even years, fully revealing the colonial nature of the island's relationship to the mainland. Cracks had begun to appear, and by the time Arecibo collapsed, plans were already underway for decommissioning.

It would be a hack metaphor if it was in a movie, wouldn't it be? The proud American institution crippled by the neoliberalizing state, before final humiliation by Chinese competition, a hurricane in all likelihood exacerbated by climate change, before finally giving up the ghost. Insert undertones of militarism and colonialism that existed since the beginning.

But if there's one thing I've learned over the last year, it's that things that would be hack metaphors in sci-fi movies are depressingly close to the reality we have, the reality of deepfake videos, Silicon Valley choked in orange haze, major news leaks coming through Tiktok, the Internet being dominated by clips of braying idiots demanding their right to not exercise pandemic protections at Yankee Candle, and Belle fucking Delphine.

Perhaps that's why I mourned Arecibo more than expected.

And perhaps that's why Sagan's hopeful message of 1974 seems more like a retelling of a certain Shelley poem:

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

The Mask of the Red Death

As an American abroad, it's again one of those times when I'm expected to explain my countrymen.

This usually isn't asked out of any genuine concern, but out of bemusement. After all, it's understandable why there's a certain schadenfreude in seeing the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world suddenly brought to its knees. But as someone who is at the end of the day an American, what it means is greater immiseration for those with whom I share a passport and a flat accent, and after the bodies are swept away, as a man more perceptive than I once said, “everything stays the same, but worse.”

I try to stay off social media, but I couldn't help but notice the ongoing arguments over masks that are apparently the topic du jour back home. Given the social stratum of which I am a part, the opinions I see are naturally far more pro-mask. I will say up front, that this is a complex issue, and I don't see one side or the other as explicitly, 100 percent right – rather, it's dependent on a lot of material-world questions, all revolving around what mask you use, how you use it, and what other measures you're taking – but that kind of nuance doesn't translate online. What seems worth interrogating as a layman, rather, is the social climate surrounding the issue, which can be as interesting as the scientific and epidemiological reality.

When I see pro-mask Facebook posts and memes, the touchstones are the standards of liberal discourse – the importance of looking out for one's neighbor, “believing science,” a nod towards success stories in other countries, and a palpable disgust at those for whom convenience = freedom. Now, those are basically good sentiments. I, too, like being kind and educated and cosmopolitan, and I, too, dislike puerile American conservatism.

The reason shit like this drives me absolutely nuts is that it is – yet again – the American reduction of what should be a cold-blooded and scientific issue to yet another goddamn, motherfucking culture war.

Like all culture wars, it is predicated upon individual and ultimately consumer action (paired, of course, with plenty of online scolding) rather than any kind of collective effort. As far as I'm concerned, if you think that consumption choices can function as a form of activism, you're as big a fucking rube as the upper middle class cunt who goes to a protest so he can take his wife to The Cheesecake Factory again – the difference being is that the plastic straw-eschewer and the mask-reminder don't do active harm.

I can empathize. You're probably stuck at home, either laid off or working from the living room, stuck with your family members who grate on you, or stuck alone, trying desperately to stay positive, trying to not feel helpless, trying not to feel like you're on a rocket to the sun, and no one is offering any valid solutions. Whether you're aware of it or not, the complete neoliberal evisceration of public services has probably fucked you, and the political and executive classes as a whole don't give a shit about you. So you click a button in the vague hope that something, anything will happen, and it feels like a measure of taking control.

The desire to act, even if your actions are purely performative, is of course not limited to American soil. At my neighborhood market in Bangkok, staff were diligently requiring masks and temperature checks. Never mind that people were rubbing their mitts all over their faces, that the cheap thermometers were likely unreliable (and irrelevant for incubating cases), that there wasn't even a semblance of social distance, and that people were, y'know, eating. The performance was to be followed.

For what it's worth, given that it's a social norm in this part of the world, I've been wearing a mask in enclosed spaces, even though I know that given the way that the humidity accumulates and the fact that it's an ordinary cloth mask, it's probably more of a risk than wearing nothing, and even though I'll probably have to remove it to communicate with a cashier (you try speaking your third language through a thick cloth mask, my dudes). I follow the performative role, simply to reduce friction. Which is why we do a lot of things, really.

The sudden spike in popularity of Contagion points to the fact that in trying times, people need metaphor systems and structures in order to not feel like their clawing at the padded walls. I haven't watched it, and I don't particularly care to.

However, I did watch Roger Corman's 1964 masterpiece, The Masque of the Red Death, with gorgeous cinematography by Nicholas Roeg (who would later go on to direct, fucking my mind with the one-two punch of The Man Who Fell to Earth and Don't Look Now), and starring Vincent Price as the leader of a coterie of wealthy perverts who try to lock themselves behind palace walls doing shits-and-giggles Satanism and having weirdly joyless orgies, trying to hide from the plague ravaging the countryside. Villagers seeking refuge are shot, plots are made, survivors are few, and the Red Death comes for everyone.

This is the metaphor I prefer. Death stalks us all – you are fundamentally powerless as an individual in an impassive universe, and to deny the existence of death is to make yourself a grotesque. The illusion of control is a great lie, and the courtiers, merrily letting the people die, concerned with saving their own skin, suffer the same fate. Salvation is a fool's errand, whether from God or Satan, and heavens and hells are human creations.

Granted, this is pretty much textbook existentialism – something conspicuously absent from contemporary film, when you come to think of it – but it was somehow comforting to feel a bit less insane. Which, in turn, means that this was my own balm, my own narrative comfort. As was writing this.

Looking Through an Old Dictionary

My roommate has the same dictionary from 1979 that my parents had when I was a kid.  American Heritage, with a glossy red cover, and the outside edges of the pages flecked with little pink dots.

I was looking for a word the other day, but I was immediately drawn in by the illustrations and photos on the side of each page, images I hadn't seen since I was a small child, rendered in black and white.  Pictures of Schopenhauer, of Emile Zola, of aardvarks and zebus.  I knew what Zola looked like years before I knew anything about him.

And there were the tables.  The tables of the orthographic pronunciation of the English language, in both IPA and proprietary American Heritage style, and of the derivation of the many languages of the Indo-European family.  Modern Assamese and Manx traced back through Middle High German, Faliscan, Avestan, Umbrian.

But the best was the measurement table.  The image of the table brought back memories of writing on sheets of printer paper that my mother had brought home from work; they still had copy from the Des Moines Register on one side.  I drew out diagrams of machines that had never been invented, pictures of rocket cars and maps of imaginary towns, always using the measurement table as my benchmark.  In my sketches, I endlessly divided length into rods and yards, weight into measurements both avoirdupois and apothecary.

On the right was the table of scientific units.  But I didn't approach it in any kind of scientific way.  This half a page seemed to contain all the mysteries of the adult world.  This was how they controlled everything-- they knew the eldritch rites of the joule and the coulomb, the farad and the candela.  If I was ever to enter the adult world, I would need to be inducted into their mysteries.  My drawings became decorated with meaningless measurements in hertz and ohms, an elaborate nonsense of Greek letters and decimals, all seeming to carry the gravity of profound science.

Remember Back to the Future?  The flux-capacitor?  You've almost certainly heard the words flux and capacitor elsewhere.  How many of you can actually define them?

The important thing isn't the science.  It's the ritual crossing into something that seems like science but is completely meaningless.  That's what I did as a seven year old child.  Without knowing it, I took the chart of scientific measurements approved by an international association, something so technical and positivist, and turned it around, took flight with it, used its symbols as the basis for something completely imaginary.

When I look back through the dictionary, the mystery of it is gone.  It has become a tool-- and not a very good one, it didn't have the word I was looking for-- instead of a totem of grown-up knowledge.

But a trace of that opacity and mysteriousness remains.  The long-dormant memories that are summoned forth are memories of these specific pictures and tables, independent of any underlying meaning.  These images of Schopenhauer and Zola have nothing to do with the Schopenhauer and the Zola that I would go on to read in my twenties.  They are little crystals embedded in the continuum of memory.